New Year New You

Acting is, for me, telling stories that need to be told, whether fictionalised or true. Maybe that's how I justify a career in which the aim is to stir souls rather than save lives, but it's the best way I know to truly "come alive" and to give of my very best.

New Year's Resolutions were originally promises to the Roman God Janus, who looked both backwards and forwards in time. Of all of us who make these promises, research suggests only one in five stick to them.

Counselling isn't all lying on couches in dark rooms with pointed-nosed, sharp-spectacled counsellors. It's just talking. Talking with a professional who is trained to not only hear, but to actually listen, and offer some thoughts that are at this point in time, alien.

It is not the resolutions themselves I hate. Losing weight, drinking less, getting fit, reading more, saving money - oh yeah, I could do with all of that. Yes please. But, why oh why are we so obsessed with the beginning of a year to kick them off?

There's no new page, no clean sweep over an old chapter that we can leave behind at the stroke of midnight on the 31st of December. We bring everything with us into this new year. Everything. Old happiness and love, old hurts, regrets, judgements, opinions and pain.

After goading us into overindulgence all December long, every January, without fail, the Gods flip the script, beseeching that we filth-spattered selves we have been dragging about for the previous twelve months and replace them with a brand spanking new version of which we can be suitably smug.

All it takes is 4 easy steps over 4 weeks. Over the next four weeks I am going to help you regain complete control of your kitchen, swap processed foods for real foods, eat healthily and have fun with your family inside and outside the kitchen with the money you save.